Current industry standards (ITU-G.7042) that provide a Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS) for virtually concatenated (VCAT) Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) virtual tributaries (VTs) or synchronous transport signals (STSs) specify an operational protocol, LCAS. As specified in these industry standards, LCAS employs both manual or management triggered link addition/removal procedures and automatic addition/removal procedures in a single state machine scheme. The virtual concatenation source and sink adaptation functions of LCAS provide a control mechanism to hitlessly increase or decrease the capacity of a Virtual Concatenation Group (VCG) link to meet the bandwidth needs of an application. It also provides the capability of temporarily removing member links that have experienced a failure. LCAS assumes that in cases of capacity initiation, increase, or decrease, the construction or destruction of the end-to-end path of each individual member is the responsibility of the Network and Element Management Systems. For example, the standards specify that LCAS may be used to increase or decrease the capacity of a container that is transported in a Synchronous Digital Hierarchy/Optical Transport Network (SDH/SONET) network using Virtual Concatenation. In addition, LCAS protocol supports the automatic decrease of capacity if a member experiences a failure in the network, and increase the capacity when the network fault is repaired. The scheme is applicable to every member of the VCG.
Management systems for delivering Ethernet-over-SONET (EOS) services will most likely be built on Time Division Multiplex (TDM) management systems that deliver T1/T3/OCn services. The TDM systems employ procedures to provision:                Endpoint T1/T3/OCn facilities        Local VT/STS cross-connections to these facilities        A number of VT/STS cross-connections in network elements in the transport network between the endpoints        
With all of these network entities provisioned, an end-to-end circuit is setup that is ready to provide T1/T3/OCn service. For EOS services that employ multiple VTs/STSs, LCAS procedures permit this service to gracefully degrade (reduce the transported data bandwidth) in the presence of VT/STS failures. The current industry standard for LCAS indicates the use of manual management link addition/removal procedures only after all facilities and VT/STS cross connections have been provisioned, but before the end-to-end circuit is setup (ready for use). However, problems arise due to the need to perform this extra, manual step before the end-to-end circuit is ready to use. No existing schemes based on the industry standard LCAS address the issue of the need for an extra provisioning step after all facilities and cross-connections are in place. A need arises for a technique with which such a circuit may be provisioned and setup that does not require this extra, manual step.